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Saturday, December 5, 2009

Creating a font from your handwriting

A while ago I made my handwriting into a font. I've used it for scrapbook pages and for personal notes. It took a little work but it's been fun to use! My youngest daughter also made a font that I've used on some pages about her.

I wasn't 100% happy with it and I want to try to create a cursive script font. Cursive fonts are a bit harder to do because the tails on the letters need to lead on to the next letter. This is how it looks:

(The text is from the MOM song - sing it to the William Tell Overture - see here youtube. Love it!)

They provide you with a template you can print out, write your alpha on, then scan back in. You then upload the template and your font is created almost instantly. It is amazing!

Because I never do things the way they're supposed to be done, I wrote my letters on another sheet. I wrote each letter of the alphabet out between an "a" and an "e" to make sure they flowed like this:

you can see how messy I was.
Then I scanned that sheet, picked the best example of each letter, and used PhotoShop to place them on the template they provided and edited it a little.

You can also see that cheated by using PhotoShop to type a cursive font that I liked (Lucida Handwriting) onto the sheet (in blue). I used that font as a guide so I could edit my letters to make them similar in size and make similar tails. Then I hid my blue layers before saving as a jpeg to upload to the site. It sounds like a lot of work but this way it was so easy to go back and tweak a few letters to get it just right.

I'm quite happy with this! :-) It looks very much like my writing but much neater! The letters are spaced out a little more than I'd like, but it's easy to change the spacing between letters (leading) in Word and in PhotoShop CS.